Who

What Comes Around

This was back when I actually lived near my friends, and hung out with a
critical mass of people who enjoyed the hobby as well. I have a small
collection of games from back then that I don’t play much any more.

The most valuable accessory, if you like board games, is a friend who is
obsessed with them, because then you get to try all the games without spending
money or, more importantly, storage space. That board games are physical
objects, which can be looked at, touched, manipulated, and put away, is both
their great attraction and their great drawback. And it’s inevitable if you
play that you eventually collect more than you want to own. Boardgame fans
revel in the frivolous, the unnecessary. You can play Sid Sackson’s classic
game Can’t Stop with 4 dice, a sheet of paper, and some pennies, yet most
people would rather have the big piece of plastic with all the little colored
tokens instead. It’s ingrained in human nature, I’m convinced. I had a friend
with the Infinite Collection of Boardgames, but then he moved to California,
which meant that I was still interested in the games but suddenly with no
access to them. This meant that I foolishly bought a few before realizing that
I was rapidly running out of space. I dealt with this by sealing the games up
in the basement and forgetting about playing them for a few years. But
recently, the urge to play has reared its ugly head again.

I have a few issues that make board games a debilitating hobby for me
personally. The first, of course, is that in order to play games I have to
interact with and speak to other actual human beings, which is always a bad
thing. But more problematic is that board gaming, as a hobby, is deeply
subject to the desire for the latent object. The board game you don’t own is always better than the
game you do own. Even when the one you are obsessing about sucks.

The best recent example of my personal latent object fetishism is that I can’t
get Advanced Squad Leader out of my mind. ASL, as it is known, is a
horrendously complex tangle of rules that no reasonable person will ever
bother to learn. I think of it as less of a game than as a medical condition.
I got to thinking about ASL because I had been playing Combat Mission on
Windows, which is a turn-based computer wargame based loosely (very loosely)
on ASL. I knew the full game was too involved for me, but when I discovered
there was a Starter Kit with slightly simplified rules, I started having
second thoughts. If you want to know what I mean when I say “slightly
simplified,” feel free to peek at this 135 page PDF tutorial that covers
some of the basics of the game.

The thing is, even if you gave me the Special Ed version of ASL, I would never
play it. First, I would never find anyone to play it with. Second, the level
of detail in the rules is, if not beyond my capabilities, certainly beyond my
level of interest. I would stop playing the game before I had finished a
single turn. I know this. Yet I still find myself idly thinking of picking up
the starter kit, instead of getting a game more well-suited to my internal
one-hour-limit game clock, such as Memoir ‘44.

Apart from my small circle of friends, I’ve never really explored the wider
boardgame geek culture. I don’t go to cons, hang out at game stores, or the
like. Recently, however, I perused the forums at
boardgamegeek.com, and discovered that the same
sorts of geek one-upmanship that happens in computer game circles (“This new
version of the game has been dumbed down because it’s not hard enough!“)
happens there as well. The best example of this I’ve seen so far is this
article, entitled “Why Memoir 44’ is not really a war game despite claims to
the contrary”, written by the
Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. It really is a masterful exemplar of the
fandom rant genre, and is not to be missed.

This shouldn’t surprise me, of course. As psu has observed, we live in a Dork
Nation, and if you’re playing
wargames you’re already a pretty serious outlier.

Anyway, I’ve tried to get my boardgame-collecting friend fired so he’ll move
back to Pittsburgh, thus sparing me from acquiring any more games, but
apparently his bosses trust him too much, so that plan has fallen through.

Maybe I can get psu addicted to boardgames, and then if I want to play them
I’ll just go over to his house. It worked with the Xbox.